Zdrasti (that means hello in Bulgarian)! Today was officially our last day of editing, and it was literally crunch time for me (I ate some "healthy" snacks while I tied up some loose ends of the project at home). The first order of business was finalizing our song choice. To be entirely honest, I met with my friend right after our previous class and we got to discussing what some of our favorite songs were growing up. By complete coincidence, they managed to mention the name of the song I had stuck in my head (whose name, of course, escaped me at the time) that would be a perfect fit for the project because of its mix of western-like and surf rock undertones, its upbeat tune, and overall popularity- "Pump It" by the Black Eyed Peas. Now, I'm not sure if you've ever seen Monty Python but that was the holy grail moment for me. After I located an instrumental version of the song, my group and I came to the general consensus that we should have the audio play when the Arizona Iced Tea can is first introduced up, until when the camera pans to a very confused Actress 2, and when both subjects go in to take a sip of the iced tea. That way, we could add another layer to our dietetic sound composition. Since the song has such a catchy melody, it will be likely to stick with the audience for the rest of the day, meaning that every time they catch themselves humming its tune, their mind will inadvertently wander back to our commercial and, consequently, our product. In fact, to test that theory, my group and I actually showed the clip to one of our fellow peers, and later on, we caught her humming the song and saying how we had gotten it "stuck in her head." Therefore, through the pure exploitation of our audience's involuntary memory association, we were certain to produce a successful commercial.
After we had finished working out our sound situation, we began to focus our efforts on trying to create the effect of heat, one that would induce a sense of thirst in our viewers from their mere perception of subtle cues. Of course, we had already taken one step towards achieving this goal by panning from the sun, which created a lens flare due to its utterly blinding brightness. I was then able to help my team take it one step further by turning up the saturation, brightness, contrast, highlights, and overall temperature of our footage, as well as lowering the shadows present in the frame by a few notches using the editing app, Prequel, to create our desired effect in post-production.
Upon doing so, we then wanted to find a way to leave a lasting impression on our audience with a final shot of the Arizona Iced Tea can, a memorable line, and the company's logo right at the end. To do this, I employed the aid of an online editing tool, Clip Champ, to blur a certain part of our commercial. We chose to blur the ending of our final shot, Scene 8, directly after our two actresses take a sip of their iced teas. Superimposed on this blurred portion of the commercial are a GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) and the following phrase "The answer to all your problems (.)", which remain on screen until the eventual fade-out of our commercial. When it came to the GIF, I could not come to a reasonable conclusion other than that the fact that it must have been a mixture of sheer luck and coincidence, that its animation was in perfect sync with the diegetic, unedited noise of our two actresses' cans clinking together with the bleachers as they were set down, to create a euphonious sound. As for the catchline, my group and I thought it was appropriate because Arizona (Iced Tea) had been the answer to every question, or problem, that had "stumped" our two subjects throughout the commercial. When choosing to include this phrase, I drew inspiration from other commercials that often make a witty reference to a running gag found within them. Moreover, I felt as though it would be best to match the text color of said phrase to one of the colors from the original Arizona Iced Tea logo, as it would create a sense of uniformity. The only issue I had was deciding which of the three colors to use; however, this matter was quickly resolved once I saw that the pink color stood out the most against the blurred background. In fact in the upcoming image, I have pictured just that.
I've included an example of Clip Champ's interface below, which also doubles as a production still for the editing of one of our scenes.
We were not able to completely stick to the original plans that we outlined in our storyboard, but the changes we made we certainly for the better, allowing for easier and more effective execution. That is not to say that our commercial did not have its share of faults. There were of course things out of our control, namely the position of the clouds in the background, ambient sounds, natural lighting (although we did wait to reshoot scenes until after the sun was no longer obscured by clouds), and wind direction, especially when having to pause and redo shots to correct minor mistakes. That, in turn, made it difficult to align the clips perfectly without errors. Hence why the cut between Scenes 5 and 6 did not blend very well together. Then again I could argue that it was an intended jump cut to the show the passage of time between Actress 1 reaching her hand out to grab the Arizona Iced Tea can and returning it back to the frame, but I will own up to my mistakes and concede that argument. Despite this imperfection, I believe that we made the best of the situation because it was only one minor flaw that did not affect the message and advertisement of the product itself, so it was one we needed to accept and move on from.
All things considered, since we were able to consolidate our film into a total length of twenty-nine seconds, during which we never strayed to include irrelevant information that would waste valuable screen time, I believe that we created the best final product that we could, given our available tools and our relative unfamiliarity with this kind of project.
I think that after all the hard work my group and I put into this film project the only thing I could even fathom doing to close off this blog is to give a feral hiss and growl the words "My precious" like Gollum did in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) to show just how possessive I am of our project!
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